Someone with the initials K.B. challenged Mental Multivitamin to answer these Shakespeare questions. I thought it would be fun to borrow the meme/quiz and answer them myself. You can play, too, if you’d like.

1. Name the first five lines of Shakespeare that come into your head. (No fair looking them up or thinking too hard.)
To be or not to be; that is the question. —Hamlet

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time. —Macbeth

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them,
But not for love.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. —As You Like It

Out, out damned spot! –Macbeth

2. The last Shakespeare play you went to see on stage.

At Shakespeare at Winedale last summer we saw The Merry Wives of WIndsor and The Tempest

3. The last Shakespeare film homage or adaptation you watched at home or at the movies.

It seems to me that we watched Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing a couple of months ago.
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4. What Shakespeare homage/adaptation/plays are on your to be read/seen list?

We’ll go to Winedale again this summer (God willing), and we’ll see Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A group of home-schooled drama students are presenting A Comedy of Errors (set in the 1920’s?) in a couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to that bit of fluff and fun.

5. Name a favorite Shakespeare-inspired work.

West Side Story

6. Why do you think Shakespeare’s plays are still popular?

MMV quotes Harold Bloom. I’ll just say that Shakespeare’s plays are still popular because Shakespeare knew about people and knew how to write plays about people and knew how to use words that people would remember and quote and use to define their own thoughts and feelings and situations.